One interesting American thing (a technical term, meaning a moment or event, a text, a controversy, an idea, a figure, or whatevertheheckelse I think of) per day, from Ben Railton, a professor of American literature, culture, history, and, natch, Studies.

December 2, 2014: AmericanWinters: The Trail of Tears

On ways to
remember, and ways to move beyond, a horrific winter tragedy.

Compared to their coverage of
virtually any other source of national shame, I would say that educational
textbooks and materials devote quite a bit of specific attention to the Trail of Tears. As usual, a
claim like this is based on my dim and fading memories of history texts from
(say) middle school, but then again that only adds to the point—in the late
1980s, at a relatively early point in the multicultural revisions of the
teaching of American history and culture, my textbooks dwelt at length and in
depth on the tragic and destructive effects of Jackson’s Indian Removal
policies on the Cherokee. More than slavery
(which in my recollection, at that level, was dealt with in general but
relatively vague ways that didn’t do nearly enough to capture the realities of
that multi-century American tragedy), and much more than shameful episodes like
the lynching
epidemic or the Japanese
Internment (which I’m pretty sure weren’t included at all), the section on
the Trail included specific numbers and evocative details, really driving home
the brutality and horror of this 800-mile
forced winter march from Georgia to Oklahoma, by the end of which nearly a
quarter of the more than 16,000 Cherokee had died.

Anyone familiar with the rhythms
of my posts can probably sense the “but” coming, and there is one, or actually
two. But first let me stress that if indeed the majority of American
schoolchildren have for at least a couple decades been reading about the Trail
of Tears from a relatively early point in their educations, then that’s a positive
and meaningful thing. I do think, though, that an emphasis on the Trail itself
(while understandable given its extreme and tragic, and thus very compelling,
nature) elides two complex and important contexts for the event, both of which
would add even more to our individual and communal understandings of it and our
history overall. For one thing, it would be crucial to stress just how fully the Cherokee had
worked by the early 19th century to combine their traditional
identities and practices with more modern and (in the dominant American
narratives) “civilized” ones. This was a nation that, among many other things,
had developed a written alphabet and was by the 1820s publishing its own
newspaper and translation of the Bible; that had developed a multi-faceted representative
form of government, including a two-tiered legislature that held regular
meetings; that had since the Revolutionary era been practicing subsistence farming
on individually operated plots of land; and that had sent a number of warriors
to fight for Andrew Jackson (!) in his critical
War of 1812 victory at New Orleans. Certainly many Cherokee leaders and
activists (and tribal members generally) disagreed with some or all of these
efforts, and that only adds to the complexity and significance of this context:
this was a nation actively engaged with the questions of what their
relationship to broader American identities entailed and what that would mean
for their communal future.

While knowing those details would
complicate any simplistic categorization of the Cherokee as either Vanishing
Americans or noble savages (two of the less bigoted but still entirely mythic and
elegiac images of Native Americans that were present in the era and have
continued to an extent into our own), they might still lead to an emphasis on
the nation as solely or centrally victims. But the second complex context, the Memorials
that the Cherokee Council prepared for Congress in protest of the Removal
policy, makes clear just how strong and impressive their voices and arguments
were throughout these years. The Memorials were most certainly written with
their specific audience in mind, and so they pay the necessary deference to the
power of the US government and “the virtuous, intelligent, and Christian
nation” that it represents. Yet they also make clear just how fully and
successfully the Cherokee had come by this moment to an identity that was at
one and the same time deeply tied to their traditions and history and
profoundly modern and forward-thinking; both of those characteristics are
highlighted by two sentences from the linked Memorial’s final paragraph: “To
the land of which we are now in possession we are attached—it is our fathers’
gift—it contains their ashes—it is the land of our nativity, and the land of
our intellectual birth. … We do moreover protest against the arbitrary measures
of our neighbor, the state of Georgia, in her attempt to extend her laws over
us, in surveying our lands without our consent and in direct opposition to
treaties and the intercourse law of the United States, and interfering with our
municipal regulations in such a manner as to derange the regular operations of
our own laws.”

The Memorials did not prevent
Jackson and his successor Van Buren from carrying out the policy of Removal,
although they may well have contributed to the Supreme
Court’s (under Chief Justice John Marshall) strong
endorsement of the Cherokee’s position and rights. Nor did the Cherokee’s
transformed and hybrid identity and community make the Trail of Tears any less
horrific or tragic. We should thus most certainly continue to learn from an
early age about Removal’s shameful and brutal effects. But if we learn at the
same time about this very complex early 19th century American
community, and about the inspiring documents through which they voiced their
perspectives and identities, we’d have a much more rich and meaningful picture
not only of the tragedy, but of the Americans to whom it happened and what we
can learn from them. Next AmericanWinter tomorrow,

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#NoConfederateSyllabus

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